What once ensured that I sat at a table next to the teacher is now posted, Monday through Friday.

I've contributed to perhaps the best humor compilation I've ever read. Available now on Amazon!

My second chapbook, "The Second Book of Pearl: The Cats" is now available as either a paper chapbook or as a downloadable item. See below for the Pay Pal link or click on its cover just to the right of the newest blog post to download to your Kindle, iPad, or Nook. Just $3.99 for inspired tales of gin, gambling addiction and inter-feline betrayal.

My first chapbook, I Was Raised to be A Lert is in its third printing and is available both via the PayPal link below and on smashwords! Order one? Download one? It's all for you, baby!

Monday, March 31, 2014

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

I spent last night consoling the cat, who, once again, bet more than she could afford to lose on the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Her team, the Michigan Wolverines, is out of the running at the hands of the Kentucky Wildcats.You can imagine her disappointment -- well, until tomorrow, when you can read about it.Until then, something from May of 2012.

There’s a woman downtown, a fixture, you might say. At hand in the bone-cracking cold of the winter, present for the oppressively heavy heat of summer, she sits. Her thin body wrapped in layers of faded men’s clothing in all weather, she is an unmoving island in a sea of human turbulence.

Surrounded by plastic garbage bags packed to a stretching, near bursting level, she has built a wall of them.

There she is now, chain-smoking. She chews on her lips, talks to herself, lights the new one with the dying cherry of the old, to be sucked into her lungs and exhaled, seemingly through her weathered, lined face. Her eyes a faint, watery blue, she looks at nothing, looks at no one.

She does not make eye contact. She does not hold a sign.

I watch from the bus stop as a young woman in a pretty summer dress buys a hot dog (All Beef Vienna Sausages!) from a street vendor, approaches the older woman with it. She holds it out, says something I can’t hear. Take it, I imagine her saying, I bought this for you. The woman shakes her head no. She doesn’t want it. The young woman, money from the hot dog purchase still in her hand, offers her the change instead. Please. Take it.

The older woman turns away, shakes her head vigorously. No. She doesn’t take anything from anyone.

Doesn’t need to.

The young woman walks away, slowly, the hot dog and the change still in her hands.

She had wanted to help.

And the old woman with the garbage bags full of her belongings lights another cigarette.

Ah, yes. I have had this experience. Bought some roast chicken from the Kroger's deli for a beggar, with sign, camped outside same. He told me he already had his lunch with him ... yoghurt. It was awkward I can tell you.

Pearl, I love how you notice people who, to many, would be invisible and not subject matter for writing. Yet they seem to have your heart.

That also happened to me. I was at a fast food restaurant and took a meal to a homeless young man, obviously mentally ill. He refused, so I sat beside him and made up a story about having been homeless too and being ashamed. He listened, then ate. Connecting sometime sis hard to do. It's easier to look away for some.